Where To Begin? When tracing the origins of today’s academic chaos, many point to the social upheaval that rocked America in the 1960s and ‘70s. Others go a bit further back, detailing the rise of the Frankfurt School in 1930s Germany and the ensuing tidal wave of critical theory that has since engulfed much of […]
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“When economists find that they are unable to analyze what is happening in the real world, they invent an imaginary world which they are capable of handling.” Nobel law and economics scholar Ronald Coase, University of Chicago Law *** Two law professors from the University of Chicago and UCLA, respectively, recently wrote a fascinating essay […]
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Coming of age as a young woman in a man’s world has always brought challenges. The track record of the psychology and psychiatry professions attempting to deal with these challenges has not been pretty. But never before have we seen the therapeutic community so eagerly inflict surgical mutilation on pre-pubescent girls struggling to accept their […]
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Miseducation and the Law in America, Part I “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” – Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2 America is litigious. Many will roll our eyes at the thought of the creatures that make it that way. Jokes learned in childhood deprecate them in titanic […]
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The woke mob’s attack on academic heretics can be likened to hunting. Most hunts attract scant attention, often no more than shooting squirrels with a .22. Blocking the reappointment of a visiting instructor at Smallville Community College who mis-gendered a student is an example of this low-level hunting. But of far greater consequence is what […]
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I remember as a college freshman seeing a cartoon taped on the door of one of the physics labs in Cornelia Hall at Iona College. It showed a student complaining to his professor, saying, “I really understand the material, I just can’t do the problems.” It’s not rocket science to understand why GenZers are struggling […]
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Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., was an outspoken ecological climatologist, former Virginia State Climatologist, and erstwhile president of the American Association of State Climatologists. For thirty years, he was a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. He was a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change […]
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Among the debates over federal student loans, two of the most important are: 1) should student loans be used to subsidize college? and 2) are student loans subsidizing college? Should Student Loans be Used to Subsidize College? Regarding the first debate, scholars have long pointed out that there is a role for government facilitation of […]
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Last week, both Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) filed their response briefs with the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS), which is now considering two lawsuits against the institutions’ admissions processes by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA). In the responses, the defendants categorically deny claims of racial discrimination in undergraduate admissions, pledge their […]
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American higher education is in crisis, but persuading students to avoid it won’t fix the underlying problems. Charlie Kirk’s new book, The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth (Winning Team Publishing, 2022), is based on the faulty premise that America can survive without higher education. No […]
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I recently began a series of articles assessing the various ways out of our current academic quagmire. In the first piece—or perhaps more accurately, the zeroth piece—I urged conservative commentators to stop spending all of their time pointing out the rather obvious double standards, contradictions, and hypocrisy within the higher education establishment, and to instead […]
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Virginia is for history lovers. George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and James Madison’s Montpelier – a triad of epicenters of our nation’s past – are all within driving distance. Those who own and operate these historic houses have a significant say over how the American Founding is taught. Unfortunately, as described in a […]
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Zig Ziglar, the late motivational speaker, wrote, “Check the records. All great failures in life are character failures, and all complete successes are character based. The need for character education is irrefutable.” Should Ziglar be dismissed out of hand because he was white? Character is a part of everything we say and do in life, and […]
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If you’re not familiar with higher education accreditation, you may want to get up to speed. Accreditation is rapidly shaping up to be one of the most important front lines in the never-ending battle between reformers and the establishment. The latest confrontation concerns the Biden administration’s effort to subvert recent reforms in Florida. But first, […]
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Once a field of serious academic research and study, anthropology has devolved into a virtue-signaling celebration of identity politics. The original goal of evidence-based understanding of mankind, its evolution, society, language, and culture, has long since been jettisoned in favor of advocacy for preferred populations and their particular sectoral interests. This devolution was launched at […]
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As part of an ambitious, five-year strategic plan to reinvigorate a civic education grounded in American founding principles and history, the Jack Miller Center has named Hans Zeiger as its next president. Zeiger will begin his new role on August 1. Founded in 2004, the Jack Miller Center is a nonprofit civic education organization based […]
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In one of the laboratory classes I teach, students learn techniques to separate heterogenous mixtures of solids. One procedure involves the separation of sodium chloride from beach sand by mixing the solid mixture in water, filtering the resulting slurry to remove the sand and evaporating the water to recover the sodium chloride. In a second […]
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Today’s assault on intellectual excellence in the academy will eventually end. Hopefully, an investigation will then commence on its causes, and all the usual suspects will be rounded up. This tribunal will, however, likely ignore one key culprit: ordinary faculty—people like me—who complained about the assault, all while enthusiastically aiding it. Yes, some criticized the […]
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“Jupiter, I should like to understand what it is you are talking about. You say your master is sick. Hasn’t he told you what ails him?” —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug” Baptists and bootleggers don’t see eye to eye. Neither joins the other in their activities, yet they benefit from each other’s existence. A cynical […]
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The Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA), a bill that was reintroduced in the U.S. Senate last month under the auspices of bipartisanship, represents a federal legislative push to expand and upgrade K-12 civic and history education through a sum of $6 billion in competitive grants over a six-year period. The proposed federal funding bonanza includes: […]
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